Reclaiming The Healing Arts of The Ancient ... - Wacana Seni

66Wacana Seni Journal of Arts Discourse. Jil./Vol.11. 2012We can see from the Japanese example an illustration of a postcolonial dilemma: when ourfeminism chooses to stress the feminine, as in the case of "maternalist" and "maximalist"feminists, we run the risk of essentialising and orientalising ourselves as "Asians" and as"natives" and in ghetto-izing ourselves as women and as feminists. In the case of Takamure, itcan also turn the other way – to women's co-optation and complicit participation in a war thatcaused untold suffering to Japan's former colonies.However, and this is my third point, uncovering, tracing and re-discovering an ancient past, asthe pioneers Hirakuta and Takamure have done, may offer a challenge, which I admit is risky –to a dominant historical view that denied women's specific feminine form of power, creativityand pro-creativity. By reclaiming the goddess and the babaylan and by naming my feminismas babaylanism, I invoke what Gayatri Spivak famously termed as "strategic essentialism," adeconstructive position she summarised as "saying an impossible no to a structure that onecriticises, yet inhabits intimately" (in Kelsky 2001).In enacting such strategic essentialist and deconstructive reading, I follow the exampleof scholars like Chiba Kei, who offered a nuanced insight on the Japanese version ofAvalokiteshvara – Kannon, Mother of Mercy. In a paper he read for the 9th InterdisciplinaryCongress of Women in Seoul (2005), he presented an alternative reading of a painting byKano Hogai, Hibo Kannon (dated 1888), famous as a representative work of Japanese modernpainting, and is often referred to as the Japanese Madonna. Chiba stated that rather than anunequivocal symbol of the "ideal" mother, this painting images Kannon as a "cross-dressing,hermaphroditic woman with a phallus and a beard," thus challenging dominant "Kannon-ical"interpretations hinged on compulsory heterosexuality and the State's ultra-nationalist agenda.This argument on Kannon and other cross-dressing women he cited like Amaterasu and theEmpress Jingu deserves further study on my part and a longer discussion in another essaydevoted to the subject of gender ambiguity.